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An important modern exponent of Asian dance, Pandit Chitresh Das brought kathak to the United States in 1970. The North Indian classical dance has since become an important art form within the greater Indian diaspora. Yet its adoption outside of India raises questions about what happens to artistic practices when we separate them from their broader cultural contexts. A Guru's Journey provides an ethnographic study of the dance form in the San Francisco Bay Area community formed by Das. Sarah Morelli, a kathak dancer and one of Das's former students, investigates issues in teaching, learning, and performance that developed around Das during his time in the United States. In modifying kathak's form and teaching for Western students, Das negotiates questions of Indianness and non-Indianness, gender, identity, and race. Morelli lays out these issues for readers with the goal of deepening their knowledge of kathak aesthetics, technique, and theory. She also shares the intricacies of footwork, facial expression in storytelling, and other aspects of kathak while tying them to the cultural issues that inform the dance.

Films like Zama and The Headless Woman have made Lucrecia Martel a fixture on festival marquees and critic's best lists. Though often allied with mainstream figures and genre frameworks, Martel works within art cinema, and since her 2001 debut The Swamp she has become one of international film's most acclaimed auteurs.Gerd Gemünden offers a career-spanning analysis of a filmmaker dedicated to revealing the ephemeral, fortuitous, and endless variety of human experience. Martel's focus on sound, touch, taste, and smell challenge film's usual emphasis on what a viewer sees. By merging of these and other experimental techniques with heightened realism, she invites audiences into film narratives at once unresolved, truncated, and elliptical. Gemünden aligns Martel's filmmaking methods with the work of other international directors who criticizeand pointedly circumventthe high-velocity speeds of today's cinematic storytelling. He also explores how Martel's radical political critique forces viewers to rethink entitlement, race, class, and exploitation of indigenous peoples within Argentinian society and beyond.

The biography of the collector of sexual folklore, cataloger of erotica, and tireless social critic Gershon Legman, whose singular, disreputable resume made him a counter-cultural touchstone.

Tuning is the secret lens through which the history of music falls into focus, says Kyle Gann. Yet in Western circles, no other musical issue is so ignored, so taken for granted, so shoved into the corners of musical discourse. A classroom essential and an invaluable reference, The Arithmetic of Listening offers beginners the grounding in music theory necessary to find their own way into microtonality and the places it may take them. Moving from ancient Greece to the present, Kyle Gann delves into the infinite tunings available to any musician who feels straitjacketed by obedience to standardized Western European tuning. He introduces the concept of the harmonic series and demonstrates its relationship to equal-tempered and well-tempered tuning. He also explores recent experimental tuning models that exploit smaller intervals between pitches to create new sounds and harmonies. Systematic and accessible, The Arithmetic of Music provides a much-needed primer for the wide range of tuning systems that have informed Western music.

Recasts Italian American food culture as an American "invention" resonant with traces of tradition.

Laura Hetrick is an assistant professor of art education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the coeditor of the journal Visual Arts Research.

Jennifer Travis is professor and chair of English at St. John's University. Her most recent book is Danger and Vulnerability in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Jessica DeSpain is an associate professor of English language and literature, editor of The Wide, Wide World Digital Edition, and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Research and Informatics Scholarship (IRIS) Center at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. She is the author of Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Reprinting and the Embodied Book

Maddalena Marinari is assistant professor of history at Gustavus Adolphus College. She is the author of From Unwanted to Restricted: Italian and Jewish Mobilization against Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1882-1965. Madeline Y. Hsu is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of the award-winning The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority. Maria Cristina Garcia is the Howard A. Newman Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. Her most recent book is The Refugee Challenge in Post-Cold War America.

Collection of previously published essays and interviews, from 1972-2009.